BT:Engage How To: Make Money Online with Your Browser Theme

Browser themes are great engagement tools and a strong reason they’re popular with online communities. Keeping in touch and driving up visits to your site deepens your relationship with your community. Plus, advertisers love an engaged audience, so you’re already doing yourself and your profitability a favor.

There’s even more opportunity and it’s easy to take advantage of. Engagement in the browser theme leads to commerce as well as increase visits to your site.

Does Commerce Work In a Theme?

Your browser theme can also help with direct sales by guiding your users into the commerce of your site. With clients using five toolbar buttons, we’ve seen better commerce with two browser theme buttons devoted to shopping. Typically, 4% of browser clicks will go to a single commerce button but 10% of browser clicks go to two commerce buttons. That’s a 25% lift by leveraging the two together. Wow!

I’m not advocating overdoing commerce. You never want to turn your audience away because you’re trying to make a buck, but there’s no harm in it either when its contextual and relevant.

Affiliate Tip for Small Business

For smaller businesses, its easier to work with Affiliate Programs and take advantage of the selling expertise of others while you just put the right product in front of your users at the right time. But a toolbar button is a little different than a web page. Most affiliate sites are set up to help you run ad banners or text links on your site. This will take a few steps on your part.

Using Amazon, as an example, if you’re logged into your affiliate account and enable their toolbar, you can quickly build a link to any product on their site. In this case, they have a sale on life-size skulls and as Halloween is approaching – this could be useful to have around. Just click the “Link to this page” in the top of the toolbar.

When you click that link, you’ll be taken to a window to get your affiliate tracking code. Click “Text Only” since you’re only after one bit of information – the URL with your affiliate code embedded.

Once you click Text Only, you’ll see a screen with a bunch of HTML code like that shown in the second image.

Finally, find the URL. It’s underlined in green in the third image for reference. You want everything between the quotation marks. Yes, it’s really long, but that’s how Amazon knows its you, plus other information I’m sure. Look for the <a href=” and then start copying. You’ll finish at “>. The URL is basically in the same kind of position across affiliate sites. You just need to find it, then copy and paste.

This is the URL you put as a button. In this example, I’d go into the theme in BT:Engage and Modify my Halloween theme. I can go to the Widgets tab, add another button to my toolbar, call it Skulls! and link to the URL. Clicking Finish makes this change live. The next time anyone using that theme launches their browser, the new button will appear in the themes toolbar. When I want to remove it, I Modify the theme again, delete the button and Finish. Voila, no more button!